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Situational Irony
Style
Explanation and Analysis:
Mansfield’s writing style in “The Doll’s House” features rich descriptions, fragmented scenes, and shifting narration. All these elements of her style can be seen in the following passage, which comes during lunchtime (here referred to as “dinner”) at the Burnell sisters’ school:
Even the dinner hour was given up to talking about [the doll’s house]. The little girls sat under the pines eating their thick mutton sandwiches and big slabs of johnny cake spread with butter. While always, as near as they could get, sat the Kelveys, our Else holding on to Lil, listening too, while they chewed their jam sandwiches out of a newspaper soaked with large red blobs.…
“Mother,” said Kezia, “can’t I ask the Kelveys just once?”
The first part of this passage demonstrates the way that Mansfield includes vivid details in a scene to bring it more fully to life. The schoolchildren do not merely eat lunch, they have particular meals (that also happen to communicate their class position)—the Burnell sisters, who are wealthy, dine on “thick mutton sandwiches and big slabs of johnny cake spread with butter,” while the lower-class Kelveys “chew their jam sandwiches out of a newspaper soaked with large red blobs.” Here readers can both visualize the scene (especially with the reference to how the girls “sat under the pines”) and also understand that these details point to a clear difference in socioeconomic status between the two groups of girls.
The transition (or lack thereof) between this scene at school and the following scene in which Kezia is speaking to her mother is also characteristic of Mansfield’s style. Rather than intentionally ending the first scene or clarifying to readers how much time has gone by, Mansfield simply adds an ellipses to the end of the lunch scene and then jumps to the middle of a scene at the Burnell home. This sort of fragmented narration is characteristic of modernist literature and is meant to destabilize the reader.
This passage also points to a final element of Mansfield’s narrative style: throughout the story, the narrator refers to Else as “our Else.” This stylistic choice primes readers to want to sympathize with Else, who they view as being “theirs” the way that a parent might. It is notable that Mansfield is consistent in referring to Else this way since the perspective and tone of the story is constantly shifting—the narrator channels the thoughts of the classist and hypocritical Aunt Beryl as well as the gentle and sensitive Kezia. The inconsistent narration is one of the ways that Mansfield juxtaposes the innocent inner worlds of young children with the hardened and cruel perspectives of the adults.
Related Themes:
